Nexus 4 Launch in the U.S Hindered by Annoying Play Store Issues

The LG Nexus 4 is upon us and Google is gracious enough to offer it for a more than decent price tag. However, the price is limited only to Google Play Store purchases, also it’s the only place you can currently get it from. Sales for the device went live yesterday in the U.S and expectedly people were looking forward to placing an order for their beloved Nexus device. The LG Nexus 4 and the Samsung Nexus 10 tablet both went on sale yesterday. If you were one of the people looking forward to placing an order for the device, you might relate with what we’re going to share next. It seems that the Google Play Store couldn’t handle the pressure and was unconvincingly slow and failed to proceed with the checkout in many cases.

Now we don’t know if this is something to do with server overload or just bad planning at the end of Google, but things certainly didn’t go down well with the users. There were people who were repeatedly pressing the refresh button on Google’s page to be among the first to get the device. After we heard reports of the device selling out within an hour of its availability in the UK and Australia, we didn’t expect any less from the U.S. Sadly though, the whole experience was marred by the Play Store’s weird functioning. And to add to the customers’ woes, Google actually put up the device for sale almost thirty minutes before the scheduled time. Basically, when the user tried to place an order for the device, the “add to cart” button took a while to show up. And when it did, there were issues with the checkout process where the error page was shown, to add to the frustration. And when the user tried to refresh the page, the item apparently disappeared from the cart. So what this meant was that the user had to repeat the checkout process and in some cases, even place the order a number of times to successfully get through. Evidently, the stocks wouldn’t last long and a few early bird buyers were actually left empty handed.

Phone Arena suggests that the Google Play Store support lines have not helped with this particular issue either. This certainly isn’t an isolated incident and the problem has been witnessed by a large number of users. Unsurprisingly, the Nexus 4 is already out of stock in the U.S with the next batch of the smartphone said to arrive in the “coming weeks”. It is unfortunate that just buying the phone would make the customer go through so much, even more so because it is Google’s premier smartphone after the Galaxy Nexus. Let’s hope the problem doesn’t persist when the Nexus 4 and 10 is back in stock again. Google, are you listening? Let us know if you went through the painful purchase/checkout process at the Google Play Store. Perhaps Google should have planned the launch better, as a massive increase in traffic was expected as the new Nexus devices went on sale. This little incident makes the company look pretty amateurish.

Disclaimer

Disclaimer: we are not affiliated with the device manufacturers or phone carriers we mention in any way, all suggestions are based on our own experience and research, you may use our advice at your own discretion.